Tape Project Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: ironbut on August 04, 2010, 07:36:01 PM
-
I noticed a week or so ago that the number of registered members here broke the 2K mark.
Unbelievable!
What really caught my eye was when I went to check the latest stat's for this website and I saw that over 400 folks registered in the month of July. That's way over twice the norm (which has been steadily growing).
If you're one of those new members, I gotta ask if there was some kind of pixie dust put in the water last month or what?
I'd love to know what caused such a huge jump in membership?
-
Before you get too excited - I think a lot of the new "members" are meatware spammers. We have gone through this on the Bottlehead forum, and over there David Bliss spends some time flushing out all of the new "members" who list "online casino", or "viagra" or "topless vixens", etc. We need to do the same here.
-
July/Aug are typically not big traffic months for user groups so I suspect Doc is correct. If you belong to any Yahoo groups, check the activity chart at the group homepage and you will see numbers that reflect this. All of the various groups I belong to are super-slow at the moment; very little, if any, traffic the past two months. November starts the heavy posts.
The Tape Op message board has some sort of a way to weed out the spam posts....something about a 'secret handshake' or something. I've never posted over there and am not sure exactly what they are doing, but apparently it's worked for them.
Tj
-
Yeah, you guys are probably right about the spammers. I've removed about 7 posts in the last 10 days or so.
I'm registered over on the Tape Op Message board and there is that extra level of security (the secret handshake). It's kind of a PITA but I bet it works pretty well. I think the first time I wanted to post over there I gave up. I didn't see the info which is in a sticky (heck, I didn't even know what a sticky was at that time!).
-
The ones that take the trouble to actually make a spam post are in the minority. Most of the meatware spammers just register and link a "Payday loan" or "nude celeb" link for a website and signature, apparently hoping you will look at their profile at some point, be a complete idiot and click on the link. The version of SMP that I am using requires me to go back and forth through about four different pages to eliminate one account, so it will probably take me a while to clean it out. I've plowed through the As and Bs so far and eliminated maybe 100 bogus spammer registrations. I suspect we will end up with something more like 400 or 500 actual members, but this is going to take some time to weed out, complicated by the fact that we are getting 20 or 30 new spammer registrations every day.
Basically I can spend the time cleaning this out, or spend the time shipping albums...so this is not a huge priority
-
OK, whilst printing the album art for Rock With Me Baby I have been systematically weeding out any member accounts based upon the following criteria -
non audio related weblinks in the signature line and and no other info like a real name or audio affiliation
website listings like "penis enlargement", "Acai berry", "Las Vegas real estate", etc.
these accounts also show no posts ever made, and most showed last activity more than 90 days ago
I have not removed any accounts that have real names in the signature or obvious links to audio related sites. I have not removed any accounts that have no weblinks in the signature. Our membership has shrunk from 2000 members to about 1300 in the cleanup. If by chance I have inadvertently deleted the account of a truly interested member, please contact me and we will get you set back up.
-
Viagra might be another good search term :)
-
I have further cleaned up the member list. This morning I eliminated any "member" who registered but was never actually online looking at forum posts. This has reduced the numbers a bit more, but not nearly as much as I had dreaded. We still seem to have a pretty active group of around 1200 members after my cleanup efforts.
-
Thanks Dan.
1200 members ain't too shabby IMHO.